4 ms·
Went back and re-read his tribute to his brother/exhortation to move forward science again. It's like You and Your Research on steroids. If that essay doesn't
by aswanson 18y ago
Went back and re-read his tribute to his brother/exhortation to move forward science again. It's like You and Your Research on steroids. If that essay doesn't motivate you, I don't know what will. Insanely brave.
- anewaccountname 18y agolink?
- yters 18y agoHas someone figured out a way around the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Or is it not a law anymore? I'm not a physicist, so I don't know these things.
- rms 18y agohttp://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- yters 18y agoThat's a sci fi story, not hard science. Absolutely nothing integral to the singularitrons' vision has been demonstrated to any extent. Instead, the opposite is shown by the fact cpu speeds have leveled out.
- aswanson 18y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074
- yters 18y agoThanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling. Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine. The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false.
- zitterbewegung 18y agoPerformance hasn't though.